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Talk:The War That Came Early
Yep, that's right. Per Silver, HT just contracted for volume 4-6. I'll post the e-mail if anyone wants. TR 22:10, February 3, 2010 (UTC) :Six books?!?! Wow. I hope he's got much bigger plans in mind than he's indicated at this point. ::I hope so. What was the blurb in HW about changing the rest of the century or something?TR 23:29, February 3, 2010 (UTC) :::I don't remember that one; just the one about "Would the Allies still have won if Chamberlain hadn't been a pussy?" Turtle Fan 23:45, February 3, 2010 (UTC) ::::Here we go: "Here is an action-packed (sic), blow-by-blow chronicle of the war that might have been–''and the repercussions that might have echoed through history''–had Hitler reached too far, too soon, and too fast." (My italics). I guess that should have clued us in that this was HT's next big project. TR 23:49, February 3, 2010 (UTC) :::::He did reach too far and too fast. Too soon I'm not sure about; I think had he restored Germany's 1914 borders and then taken several years off, the world would have gotten used to the idea that all he had wanted to do was redress Germany's legitimate grievances against Versailles. Then he might have been able to launch a surprise attack from a more advantageous position after the Allies disarmed. Maybe if he'd waited longer he could have fought the war atomically; of course, the US would have been able to do so as well, so that I think we can call a wash. :::::To date HT's changed some elements of the war which might be considered fairly major within the context of WWII, but as it looks now I see him going down to defeat and the rest of history trudging on fairly close to its original pattern. Maybe some of the borderlands that wound up in the Soviet sphere will be in the Western and vice versa, maybe some weapons technology will develop a little differently, but I can't see the story giving us a 1950 or a 1960 at which we would look and say "Oh shit! That looks nothing like OTL!" But if there are five more books to come, I might be prematurely ejaculating myself in terms of that particular criticism. Maybe in Book Two Stalin makes peace with Hitler and joins the Axis or something, as Birmo had teased us with at the end of the first AoT book. Turtle Fan 00:10, February 4, 2010 (UTC) :I would enjoy reading the e-mail. Not enough to try to remember what my Yahoo! login was from 2006 when last I used it and to hope it still works, but if you're offering I'll take you up on it. Turtle Fan 23:24, February 3, 2010 (UTC) ::It's actually not very substantive but here you go: "Steve- How many books are planned for the Hitler's War series? I really enjoyed the book. Randy Harry just signed a contract for books 4-6. -- Steven H Silver shsilver@sfsite.com" TR 23:29, February 3, 2010 (UTC) :::Randy "really enjoyed" Hitler's Bore? Well someone's not hard to impress. Turtle Fan 23:45, February 3, 2010 (UTC) Characters Another thought--Even if the story does get better, HT's going to have a hell of a time carrying six books with the cast of Hitler's Bore. The core cast of TL-191 who kept coming back for ten books included some characters who were interesting from their first scenes to their last (Lucien Galtier, Sam Carsten, Roger Kimball, Cincy if he did become redundant in TG, like everyone else, Featherston did have a certain magnetism about him even though it never overcame his despicability to raise him to the status even of a compelling villain like Darth Vader or Moriarty, not in anyone's mind but Gizzi's); some who started strong and faded (Potter, O'Dull, Flora, Scipio, and I would include Nellie though I know that will be controversial); some who started off slow but got better as they went (Sylvia, Reggie, Anne Colleton she regressed to the mean a bit at the end); and some who were consistently uninteresting (everyone who's left, in a kind of general blah zone; but I would like to single out Hip Rodriguez and Mary McGregor in particular as being so tiresome that the blah zone is too good for them). Even the dullest characters had enough of a personality to carry some small part of the story without immediately making us indifferent to it by association. In Worldwar there was an even stronger cast to carry the books, especially the original four, which were in most danger of running together. Some of my all-time favorite HT characters come from there: Atvar, Teerts, Straha, Ussmak, Larssen, Jager, Molotov, Liu, Anielewicz, Russie--The list just goes on and on! Yeager was never my cup of tea (and Indiannapolis has nothing to do with that, I just did not find him likeable, not from the very beginning) but he had a very dynamic, fully formed personality and he easily shouldered the burden of being the series's most important character at the end. In Darkness (which reminds me most of what I think TWTPE is going to become, because, once you do the mental conversions of Unkerlant=USSR, et cetera, you realize you're looking at essentially the same WWII with some small- to mid-sized alterations, including a Japanese invasion of Siberia) the core cast was weaker than either WW or 191, but there were characters I cared about very much (even though I'd have trouble naming many of them offhand all these years later) and the characters who were too dull for that, they still managed to make an impression over the years--again, they managed not to wear too thin to advance their parts of the plot when needed. But these prematurely ejaculating characters? I never even learned most of their names, not in 500 pages. HT could pull "Carsten went to Ireland" gaffes left right and center and I'd never notice. And none of them impressed me with any character traits. The Soviet airman takes propaganda with a grain of salt, the British sergeant is old, the Abe Lincoln is a dogmatist, as is Rudel, the Czech soldier seems to be perpetually pissed off, and of course every one of them smokes, except Rudel, whose naivete extends well beyond politics. I didn't see Turtledove even try to give any of these characters any traits, not even to the point that got me mildly invested in otherwise dull gray characters like Armstrong Grimes or Skarnu, who seem as larger-than-life as a Richard III or a Tom Sawyer when you put them beside the HW torch-bearers. HW POVs only stood out if they did something unusual, or rather, since none of them actually did anything, if they did nothing in a novel setting: wasting paper while idling in Berlin, wasting paper while idling in Beijing, wasting paper while idling in a U-Boat that's not allowed to sink any boats. The Japanese soldier stands out because he was Japanese, and because he gave us coverage of the one and only time something interesting happened, the invasion of Siberia and/or Kazakhstan; but I suspect he'll wear thin rather quickly once that front starts up and he just does the same sort of thing every other grunt is doing. Even the Jewish girl wasn't as interesting as she could have been. She seemed like just a poor man's Vanai--a very poor man's Vanai; I actually found that the real Vanai told, along with Ealstan, a very compelling story. I didn't feel that way about her at this point in Darkness so maybe she'll grow up and become a real character. The rest? I really don't see how they can manage to tell a six-volume story. Turtle Fan 06:31, February 4, 2010 (UTC)